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Aaron D. Graham

Prospectus

4/21/2017

Committee: Chair: Dr. Mark Bauerlein; Co-Chair / External Member: Dr. Shoshana

Felman; 2nd Departmental Member: Dr. Natasha Trethewey

Real Poetry Can Communicate Before it is Understood

Of the many hundreds of essays T.S. Eliot wrote over the course of his lifetime, he

collected and published in book form only ninety-nine. This corpus, taken by itself, however,

illustrates a consistent focus in Eliots critical thought on one particular issue: the process of

poetic composition. When Eliot articulates a critical, theoretical, or aesthetic paradigm in an

early essayparticularly when he professes to adopt such a principle as a working theoryit

will appear again in some variant form, sometimes after an absence of a decade or more1. Eliot

continually ponders these percepts efficacy, takes up their viability, and reinterprets their value

in light of the appropriateness and relevance to the present moment. Eliot may try out four or five

different formulations of his own and others practice of composing poetry across the span of a

single volume of his collected prose. When we read them, we watch the foundational principles

characteristic of Eliots early understanding of poetics, criticism, and culture evolve into more

developed, nuanced iterations of poetics.

My dissertation will concentrate on one of these developments: the transformation of

personal experience, its intense subjectivity and, ultimately, its utter incommensurability, into
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poetical material. Eliots first articulation of a poetic process emerges in Eliots graduate work at

Harvard and his somewhat unconventional theory of the purpose and power of the poetas the

master practitioner, the wordsmith, the architect of language. These theorizations reveal a

consistent basis for Eliots understanding of poetic impersonality, tradition, the objective

correlative, and the poets historical sense. Examining Eliots main ruminations on poetic

composition, including in long unpublished or unavailable writings (recently collected in a

massive scholarly project), my dissertation shall consider the chief aim of the poet to be,

according to Eliot, engag[ing] in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalents for states of

mind and feeling (KE 289). I will argue that, in light of the T.S. Eliot Editorial Projects

collection and release of these voluminous and penetrating writings, Eliot can be seen as always

deeply involved in this process of poetic composition. For Eliot, great poetry involves finding

new combinations of affective intensity through the active invention of a language capable of

expressing the equivalent of a state of mind or feeling.

The earliest evidence of this concern in Eliots writing appears in Eliots graduate

coursework in philosophy at Harvard. Several essays from this period illuminate how his young

mind approached systems of thought and belief in fertile ways. There was a vibrant

philosophical and psychological conversation in academia and broader society at the time,

including the spread of psychoanalysis, and it impressed Eliot profoundly. Theories of

perspectivism, point-of-view, and moral relativism characterize the psychologies of William

James, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, and Bradley all whom Eliot read avidly in

his graduate study and contributed to the literary culture Eliot inhabited. In considering these

principles I shall invoke portions of Eliots commentaries on them while considering the effect

they had in shaping Eliots sensibility in relation to poetic and social criticism. These
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engagements between Eliot and the philosophers will shape my engagement with my own

composition.

In 1911, for instance, he penned a pair of essays for Josiah Royces seminar in Kant. The

solemnly titled An Essay on Kantian Categories and Kant and Agnosticism, respectively,

articulate a schema for ordering points-of-view and explaining that from each of these points-of-

view a reality is posited. The content of these perspectival realities essentially differs inasmuch

as they cannot be said to be identical or unified. Because every perspective is individual, one

point-of-view can never fully coincide with another. Furthermore, reality is always filtered

through that viewpoint. The resulting objective-seeming world, in truth, consists of all the

outside content subjectively developed. While one point-of-view can include another point-of-

view is in its reality, it cannot include it as it is. Not only that, but it cannot include itself. That

would be to escape point-of-view altogetheran epistemological impossibility. The early essays

on subjectivity, we shall see, anticipate Eliots later conceptions of the objective correlative and

the impersonal poet.

Another essay on the same epistemological issues appeared a few years later in 1916,

The Development of Leibnizs Monadism. This essay on a remote philosophical issue in fact

prefigures the scenes of isolation and impotence in later poems such as The Hollow Men. In

it, Eliot argues that individuals can only experience their own realities, and while able to make

broad generalizations from within his own bubble concerning any shared aspects of reality

which ultimately dissolve as unascertainable speculations and do not provide so much as a

glimpse into anyone elses point of view. We are all monads of isolation. Finding a poetic

sensibility articulated in Leibnitzs theory of monadsin the monads paradoxical

impenetrability and simultaneous incommunicabilityEliot discovers a point-of-view capable of

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representing the modern urban consciousness. Eliot depicts this condition as an affliction of the

mind, an isolating sensitivity amid and in response to the overwhelming chattering hordes and

faceless hotel porters we encounter in The Waste Land and other early poems. This conception

highlights the threat posed by the invading awareness of others points of view, which, though

they remain incomprehensible and unknowable, can still exert pressure on others. Efforts of

contact and empathy run up against a terrible fact: communicating ones internal relations is

impossible. They only generate a paralytic consciousness characterized by radical isolation

within the urban crush of humanity.

This Prufrockian consciousness originates in Eliots characterization of emotional states

and their irreducible internality and ultimate incommunicability. He outlined that

characterization his 1916 essay Leibnizs Monads and Bradleys Finite Centers. I shall contend

that the foundational principles for Eliots literary and cultural criticism coalesce in these

philosophical papers. They consolidate years of philosophical study by Eliot, particularly of F.H.

Bradleys notions of immediate experience, points-of-view, and objects of intention.

Throughout his life, Eliot returns to philosophical writings from this period. They provide

fertile soil for creative generation and the metaphysical touchstone for the objectives of his

critical practice. Eliot said so explicitly in a later essay, Swinburne the Poet and Critic, which

I take to be a cornerstone for Eliots poetics. I believe the critical writings of poetsowes a

great deal of interest to the fact that the poet, at the back of his mind, if not as his ostensible

purpose is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that

he wants to writewhen he theorizes about poetic creation, he is likely to be generalizing one

type of experience What he writes about poetry, in short, must be assessed in relation to the

poetry he writes. In other words, Eliot developed a theory of experience, knowledge, and
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consciousness that ground them in their uneasy relation to inexpressible, subjective emotional

states. This theory proved central to his poetry and criticism for the rest of his life. The first part

of my dissertation will expound this theory and how Eliot rectums to it again and again in his

criticism.

This description of Eliots theory and practice, which Eliot himself examined over and

over, is a model of poetic composition that leads into the second section of my project. Here I

shall apply Eliots poetics to my own work. I shall begin with an autobiographical note. I have

been a practicing poet for a number of years. I have been selected to attend the Squaw Valley

Poets Writing Workshop, where I worked with Robert Hass and C.D. Wright, and also served as

Editor of the Squaw Valley Review. I have attended The Ashbury Home School in Hudson, New

York, been selected as the Cecilia Baker Veterans Memorial Fellow for the Seaside Writers, and

received a full bursary and fellowship to the Cambridge Writing Retreat in New Orleans. I have

been awarded residencies at the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art in North Adams,

Massachusetts and in Truchas, New Mexico. My chapbooks The Hurry up and the Wait and

Skyping from a Combat Zone have been shortlisted for the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden

National Prize and my full-length manuscript Blood Stripes has been shortlisted for The

Berkshire Prize. My poems have appeared in numerous publications including: The Taos

International Journal of Poetry and Art, Grist, Zero-Dark Thirty, SAND, Berlins Preeminent

Journal of the Arts and Letters, The Seven Hill Review, Cleaver Magazine, Scalawag,

Alternating Currant, Heartwood Review, East Bay Review and others. My poem Blood Stripes

won the 2017 Luminaire Award for best poem, Olfaction won the 2016 Penumbra Poetry

Prize, and PTSD Poem #12 won a Readers Choice Award, was a national finalist for Best

New Poems of 2016, and was nominated for Best of the Net. I serve as the poetry editor for
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Muse /A, assistant poetry editor at The Tishman Review, and I founded and currently run a

weekly poetry workshop on writing the military experience for Veterans and their families at the

Atlanta VAMC. My poetry represents a unique contribution to the arts and stands apart from the

work of Brian Turner, Phil Klay, and other war poets in that represents the experience of an

enlisted United States Marine across three deployments and treats the subject matter of my

experience on the front lines as a human intelligence operative, Arabic translator, and

counterintelligence expert.

I bring up my experience and achievement in order to assure readers that I have a corpus

of work that merits this Eliot-inspired reflection. I sincerely wish to examine my own poetic

development from my first efforts to record my wartime experience to the present moment. I

regard this as an analytic endeavor not an autobiographical one. In a sense, this turn to my own

work in this dissertation is essential to my understanding of the poetic tradition.

When I returned from my tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, I aimed to complete my

undergraduate education as a premed student. In my senior year, however, something happened:

I read The Waste Land. From the very first sentence of the epigraph, which was, of course, in

Latin and which I did not understand at all, a new ambition came over me. Medical school and

clinical practice suddenly seemed uninteresting. Something in the poem spoke to me on a

personal level, touching me as no other experience had since I had left Iraq. The poem struck me

as vital. I struggled to read through it, often confused and skeptical, but could not stop thinking

about it. I knew I did not understand the poem, but I came to believe it understood me. I had to

keep going. I spent nights in the library with dusty volumes of Frazer, Weston, Kenner,

Schuchard, and any essay by Eliot I could get my hands on. I changed my Major. From now on

I was an aspiring poet and wanted more Eliot and more of everything Eliot thought important:
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Dante, Middleton, Petronius Aeschylus Just as Baudelaire, Dante, and Pound directed Eliot

into a poetic career, Eliot did the same for me.

I took lessons, too, in how Eliot regarded himself as a poet. Eliot constantly reexamined

the composition of his own poems in the context of what he was reading and what he continually

read throughout his lifetime. Much of his prose writing constitutes an honest examination of

those poets he admires and returns to as wellsprings of creative emotion. I plan to take this

approach as a model in this section. I propose the same general treatment of my own poetic

development by considering how Eliot saw the function, of the poet and the critic to be bound up

in the explication of his own work and poetic practice. He explored his practice in such as way as

to trace a through-line from the literature he consumed and that saturated his sensibility and

made his own poetic creation possible. He hoped to elucidate by example the process of poetic

composition as a transmutation of experience and sensibility. He did it in such as way that it

could be of service to other practicing poets and give them the tools necessary to pursue their

own unique and individual poetic practices. With me he succeeded.

Let me anticipate one element that will prove central to my discussion. Eliot was

absorbed by the difficulty of converting private experience into poetic form. Could one render

ones own subjectivity to another and be understood? Eliot always worried about the inevitability

of solipsism. One sees it repeatedly in the poetic rafters of his early verse; for instance, it

suffuses Prufrocks very character (that is not what I meant at all) and dominates what has

come to be known as the dialogue of the nerves in the second section of The Waste Land. In it,

Eliot dramatizes this solipsistic isolation in the couple who can barely speak to one another

(What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / I never know what you are thinking.

Think.)
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I shall pose the same question with this difference: my wartime experience will be an

added ingredient to the poetic process. My poetry springs directly from that experience, but I

understand the translation of experience into verse as anything but direct and simple. I shall,

therefore, include some ideas derived from trauma theory, which usefully identifies the psychic

complications of communicating intense experiences in words. Here, the work of trauma

thinkers from Freud to Cathy Caruth shall be invoked. Still, I will remain mostly within the

philosophical questions Eliot posed following his studies in Bradley, Bergson, James and the

other philosophers and psychologists of his time.

I shall conclude this section with what I have discovered in my own poetic process,

especially as it relates to trauma and self-expression. I shall exercise the same kinds of

introspection and retrospection that Eliot did when he looked back upon the composition of The

Waste Land and other poems many years later. As Eliot pondered over and over the poets, poet-

dramatists, and philosophers whose words and thoughts saturated his consciousness--

compressing aspects of their craft, recombining these with lived experience, and filtering this

material through his poetic sensibility--his valuation of their importance over time steadily grew.

I will do the same thing, examining my poetry in light of the verse running through my

consciousness. Deliberating over the thinking that went into the formation of my own verse, I

will reflect on poets with whose poetry I had become thoroughly familiar, along with

philosophers whose work had influenced my thinking about experience and whom I encountered

through Eliotand thus through the lenses of his poetic and critical sensibilities. I will argue the

merits and limitations of my poetry can only be fully appreciated when situated in the context of

the influences exerted by Eliot (and, by association, Eliot's influences), trauma theory, and my

own experience in combat.

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In the final section of my dissertation, I shall return to the literary past. The subject will

be a writer who preceded Eliot by an generation, Oscar Wilde. Two substantial works written by

Wilde during and after his two year imprisonment and forced manual labor in Reading Gaol, De

Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, bear directly up on the problematic of traumatic

experience and poetic expression. This section will provide an interpretation of De Profundis and

The Ballad of Reading Gaol in precisely these terms: the difficulty of conveying intense personal

experience in poetic form. It will assume a theoretical point about the limits of languages

descriptive function and relate it to the details of Wildes incarceration.

Ill begin with De Profundis, which highlights the apex of subjectivity and personality in

Wildes corpus. It is remarkable because of its subjective language and a corollary inability fully

to convey the substance of the emotional register Wilde attempts to reach. De Profundis focuses

exclusively on two things: the personal recollection of Wildes suffering during his confinement

at Redding Gaol and the deep significance he gives it. The work ends up, however, leveraging

only the significance Wilde insists his experience has. The first, more immediate part of the

presentation is never quite realized. That is, the book stops short of attempting to convey the

emotional state of that pain in any way accessibly to the reader. Wilde paints his personal

sufferings with an opaque description focused on assuring the reader of the value and importance

of his suffering without granting the reader access to the emotional content of that experience.

The resulting process is the opposite of what Eliot attempts to codify with the objective

correlative. Ultimately, we get only the personalized description of how Wilde feels about his

emotional states. We do not see, let alone feel, anything of the emotional states themselves.

Thus, the work becomes a one-dimensional rendition that imbues unrelatable experience

with a transcendent quality. Thats the only meaning and virtue of Wildes suffering that comes
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thought. He recounts the difficulty of bearing such an emotional burden, but doesnt detail the

emotion itself. Wildes representation becomes an exercise in moralization, not the description

of his intense anguish as he languished in varied states of despair, pity, and shame, but a

reflection upon it. It reads like one of Aesops fables whose moral is more important than the

action. We end up with a positive valuation of Wildes experience, a sort of inverted saints life.

This leaves the reader without any access to the deep humanity of the emotions and experiences

of Wilde, however, as none of the raw material and emotional intensity of these trials is left in

the text. In the end, the author writes about and glorifies his intellectual ability to reduce real

pain to flatly moralized and sometimes whimsical hedonism. In sum, we get all of the

personality of Wilde without any impersonal or universal emotional content. The deep irony in

Wildes authorship is that in this work, which proposed to lay bare the emotional devastation of

his experience in Reading Goal, Wilde obscures his emotion and frustrates our identification

with his affect.

In The Ballad of Reading Gaol something different happens, First of all, the immediate

object of the poem is not Wilde himself but another prisoner. The effect of this choice is to

deflect the problem Wilde faced in De Profundis, that is, how to express his full experience in

words and be understood by others. Here, Wilde becomes an observer of another self. The

Ballad provides an elucidative counterpoint to De Profundis. It focuses on depicting suffering,

but in an indirect way. Wilde turns his attention from himself and toward a fellow inmate, a shift

with profound narrative and psychological implications. Wilde is confined in one cell, the other

inmate to a different, distant cell. Wilde cannot see him or hear him. They dont know each

other. But Wilde has heard from another prisoner that this man is scheduled for execution.

Wilde proceeds to imagine the mans experience as his death approaches. The effort becomes an
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exercise in the very problems that obsessed Eliotthe communication of human suffering, the

escape from ones own ego. Wildes description of the other prisoners execution, and the mans

emotional state in the hours and minutes leading up to it, do not rely on describing emotions as

emotions, but rather through the objective particulars surrounding the execution.

In the poem, the speaker notices that his guard, whom he only ever sees form the knee

down, is wearing dress pants and polished, uniform boots. He realizes that the day of the

execution has come. Later, during the fifteen minutes of daily exercise Wilde is permitted, he

hears sawing taking place in the exercise yard and concludes that the gallows are being hastily

erected for the ceremony. Noticing the clank of the shovels against the hard, packed dust of the

yard, he imagines the inconspicuous gravesite where the prisoner will be quickly interred

following his execution. All of these experiential particulars are not experienced directly by

Wilde, but intuited from a limited number of sensual particulars into which he projects emotional

meaning. This process itself is similar to what Eliot details as the objective correlative and

establishes an indirect and distanced mode of speaking about the other inmate. It relies on the

projection of empathetic intensities, expressed through a configuration of poetic images.

There is a second point to make along these lines, a formal one. The work presents an

interesting innovation in its utilization of the ballad genre. The conventions of the ballad, one

might assume, would constrict Wildes expression. How can such intense emotions fit into a

literary structure? But, I shall argue, that very structure allows him to perform interesting

maneuvers that reveal a psychological condition in a way that prose can not. The poem appears

prima facie to be formally arranged by the ballad structure, one that, through the refrain,

incorporates ballad rhyme scheme, metrical pattern, and stanza length into the portrait of a fellow

prisoner. Wilde turns this formal structure to his advantage and deploys the structure of the poem
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as a mimetic device, one that represents the cyclical structure of life in prison and the

hopelessness and encaged character of all the prisoners existence. The nature of the suffering,

containment, restraint, and silence of prison, as well as the trauma and dehumanization that

incarceration perpetrates on all the jailed souls, becomes mimetically represented through the

Sisyphean sense of return and repetition in the ballad form. The encased rhyme scheme

ABCBDB also confines two of the rhymed lines within the stanza. The scheme thus becomes a

formal representation of the enclosed experience claimed by Wilde to typify the other prisoners

(those without a death sentence) day-to-day existence in Redding Gaol. The final non-encased

B rhyme propels the reader onward to the next stanza. This verbal structure serves as a mimetic

construction of life in Redding Gaol. It leads the reader from the encased lines, just as prisoners

are led into the next hour, the next meal, the next exercise, the task, the next day. The force of

the preceding rhyme scheme is only halted by the dissonance of the stanza break, which might

signify the forced beginning of each prisoners daily Sisyphean existence.

Paradoxically, this distancing of suffering, shifting from himself to a stranger, allied with

the deployment of poetic form as a representation of the structures of prison life, enables Wilde

to speak more concretely and experientially than he did in De Profundis. Wilde is able to get his

self out of the way and communicate authentically about suffering. He decontextualizes his own

emotions and projects them empathetically as the imagined experience of the condemned

prisoner.

I can speak to a similar phenomenon among survivors of wartime trauma: it is easier for

soldiers and marines to recognize, act on, and address suffering that is not their own. This is an

observable fact about trauma survivors. They can often attend to the pain of others better than

they can attend to their own pain. Indeed, it is often through empathizing with the pain of others
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that they begin to find outlets of expression and ways of existing through which they can better

attend to their own pain. For myself, I can say, the act of empathizing with the pain of others

allowed me, for the first time, accurately to externalize and communicate my own pain and find a

productive way to deal with it.

This treatment of De Profundis and The Ballad completes the interpretative thrust of my

dissertation. In my conclusion, I will return to my own experience and my own work. De

Profundis and The Ballad form two polar responses to this fundamental need to express what has

happened to me. I returned form the war, got married, and became a father, but the urge to

recount my experience remained. On one hand, the desire to bare my soul, to blurt out the

anguish and the frustration, surged inside me. But I felt blocked and uncomprehending. My

own experiences and their ultimate significance seemed unclear and I looked to the future as if I

were facing a void.

But this urge to communicate was not intended to make my experiences legible and my

pain understood. At that point, it was the opposite, a cry of indescribable pain not yet processed.

Even today, I have yet to make full sense of my past, but nonetheless retain the need to recognize

it and have others do the same. This could be called a desire to be heard, not necessarily a desire

to be understood. I can even admit that a level of incomprehensibility may provide a comforting

cushion in the first stage of the process of expression. It reaffirmed to me the uniqueness and

deep value of the suffering I endured. Still, the desire to make sense of these experiences and

find an adequate mode of representation in order truly to communicate them, to make myself

legible to others, is a real if secondary motivation. It is this paradoxical desire to be able to

communicate fully and to claim special privilege and meaning for my own experience that

animates my work.
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I came back to the States intending to become a doctor. It made sense in the context of

the preceding yearssix months undergoing treatment and countless surgeries at Balboa Naval

Medical Center and watching my brothers in the Wounded Warrior Regiment endure the same or

worse, on top of three years in and out of combat zones witnessing violence inflicted on

innocents and inflicting violence myself. The desire to pursue a career in the medical profession

healing and helping others struck me as a appropriate next chapter in my life. Id seen how

important a good doctor could be for someones treatment and recovery. I had also seen how a

bad doctor, or one who did not intimately care for his patients and take the time to invest and

deeply involve himself in their care, could be detrimental or even counterproductive to the entire

healing process. The desire to work in medicine answered a need I felt to help the community

and in some way make recompense for the pain I inflicted as an interrogator during the war.

But this aim only dealt with a surface level of the pain I felt. Something was missing. As

a senior, in order to fulfill a graduation requirement, I had to take a sophomore-level English

class. Thats when I read The Waste Land. The poem not only spoke to me about my own

experience; it was the first time since I left Iraq that I felt understood by anyone. When I

translated the epigraph from Petronius and my hand wrote, When the boys asked her Sibyl,

what is it you wish for? She responded, I wish to die (CPP 123), I knew that experience. I

had lived that experience. That line, that poem, saved my humanity if not my life. At that

moment I was struck with the power of poetrythe power to convey humanity back to an

individual who had presumed that his was forever lost. I, the Marine with full sleeve tattoos and

a hyper-masculine demeanor, was reduced to tears in front of a horde of nineteen-year-olds. That

day I learned the redemptive power of poetry. Besides my faith in God, there is nothing that

assures me more. I began to read more of Eliots work, smitten by this mind that so perfectly
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read mine at a centurys distance. He despaired of solipsism, but he certainly succeeded with me.

I found a sensibility that I understood both in practice and in theory. I began to write my own

poetry and after many juvenile attempts and undertaking a substantial reading project, began to

produce poetry made me and my pastan inflictor and a recipient of painlegible. The process

of transmuting my own experiences and the feelings associated with them was guided by and can

most be accurately be described in Eliots terms The man that suffers and the mind that creates

(SE 12). Eliots process of poetic composition has been essential to my own healing through

poetic composition and has germinated into a necessary reconsideration of Eliots own writings

about his poetic process in light of the new public release of his complete prose.